Research

Research

In addition to my current project, Dangerous Power: An International History of German Unification, 1969-1993, my research agenda involves broader work on the history of Europe, political culture, and international relations in the modern era.

Research

Research

In addition to my current project, Dangerous Power: An International History of German Unification, 1969-1993, my research agenda involves broader work on the history of Europe, political culture, and international relations in the modern era.

Dangerous Power demonstrates how institutions once designed to contain German power have been overtaken and dominated by Germany and ultimately have facilitated the Federal Republic of Germany’s benign hegemony over Europe. In their forty-year effort to contain German resurgence, Bonn’s neighbors created precisely what they hoped to avoid: German preponderance in Europe. For a generation, nationally divided and deprived of their sovereignty, the West Germans exercised the only influence in international affairs that they could—by pressing for greater multilateral cooperation, for economic integration, and for military equilibrium in Europe. From the 1960s to today, they fashioned the institutions that outlived the east-west conflict altogether and that have guided European order in the twenty-first century. NATO, the European Union, European Monetary Cooperation, the G7, the CSCE—each originally a means of containing German power and wealth—have all been transformed into engines linking Germany to the world it once had sought to destroy.